My name is Andrew
Joyce and I write books for a living. I would like to thank Norm for
allowing me to be here today to discuss my latest book Yellow Hairand the research that is involved with writing an historical novel
or an action/adventure novel that uses an historical event as a
backdrop.

I
want to say that I learned the hard way how important is proper
research. But it wasn’t really that difficult of a lesson. In my
first book, which takes place in the last half of the 19th
century, I made two mistakes. I had the date of an event off by one
year and I had my hero loading the wrong caliber cartridge into his
Winchester rifle.

I
would have gone blissfully throughout life not knowing how I had
erred if not for my astute fans. Both mistakes were quickly pointed
out to me in reviews of the book. One fellow said he would have given
me five stars if not for the wrong caliber bullet mistake. I had to
settle for four stars. Lesson learned!

Before
I begin explaining to you about the year-long research I did for Yellow
Hair, I’d like to
tell you how I researched my second and third books and describe what
that research entailed.

My
second book was a western and the protagonist was a woman. The
research took about three months. I had to know everything from
women’s undergarments of the late 19th
century to prison conditions for women in those days. (I sent my
heroine to jail.) That kind of research was easy. Thank God for the Internet! Molly (my
protagonist) built up her cattle ranch to one of the largest in
Montana, but she and her neighbors had nowhere to sell their beef. Consquently, Molly decided to drive her and her neighbors’ cattle to Abilene
where she could get a good price. She put together the second largest
herd on record (12,000 head) and took off for Abilene.

That’s
when I had to really go to work. I wanted my readers to taste the
dust on the trail. I wanted them to feel the cold water at river
crossing. I wanted them to know about the dangers of the trail, from
rustlers to Indians to cattle stampedes.

This
is how I learned about all those things and more. I
found old movies that were authentic in nature. I watched them to get
a feel for the trail. Then I read books by great authors who had
written about cattle drives to soak up even more of the atmosphere of
a cattle drive. That was all well and good, but it still did not put
me in the long days of breathing dust and being always fearful of a
stampede.

That’s
when I went looking for diaries written by real cowboys while they
were on the trail. After that, I found obscure self-published books
written by those cowboys. Then it was onto newspaper articles written
at the time about large cattle drives. That’s how I had Molly herd
the second
largest cattle drive. I discovered that the largest was 15,000 head,
driven from Texas to California in 1882.

My
next book took place in the Yukon during the Klondike Gold Rush of
1897. Here new elements were added such as wolves and the extreme
weather as adversaries. Dogsledding was also involved. I have seen
snow only three times in my life and I have never dogsledded. I knew
even less about wolves. I had to learn about those things. I had no
idea what it was like to travel across a wilderness on a dogsled at
seventy degrees below zero. I also had to acquire knowledge about the
dogs themselves, especially the lead dog. I learned about all that by
doing the same things I did for my second book. The old diaries were
the most helpful. As to the gold rush, there was plenty of material
in the form of self-published books by some of the participants. Some
were never even published, but I found copies of the manuscripts in
the archives of universities and historical societies. Again,
newspaper stories printed at the time were very useful. Concerning
wolves . . . I read everything I could get my hands on about
wolves—their habits, the pack hierarchy, the alpha male, and the
different jobs or tasks the males and females have while hunting.

Now
we come to Yellow Hair.
As I mentioned above, the book is about the Sioux Nation from 1805 to
1890. I had to know both points of view, the white man’s and the
Sioux’s. Getting to know the whites’ take on things was easy.
There are many, many books (non-fiction) that were written at the
time. I even found a book written by Custer detailing his strategy
for wiping out the Sioux entirely. That was hard reading. And, again,
there were universities and historical societies whose archives were
a great help.

As
to the Sioux’s point of view, there are a few books that were
dictated to newspapermen years later by the Indians that took part in
the various battles that I weave into my story. I found a lot of
material from Native American participants of the Little Big Horn,
written twenty to thirty years after the fact.

But
I wanted to immerse myself in the Sioux culture and I wanted to give
them dignity by using their language wherever possible. I also wanted
to introduce them by their Sioux names as a result I had to learn the Lakota
language, which wasn’t easy. There is a consortium that will
teach you, but they wanted only serious students. You have to know a
smattering of the language before they will even deign to let you in.
I had to take a test to prove that I knew some Lakota. I failed the
first time and had to go back to my Lakota dictionary and do some
more studying. I got in on my second try.

I hope I’ve
given you a little insight into the research process. It’s
time-consuming and sometimes frustrating. But it is also a blast.
Every new discovery is like finding the motherlode.